Is a Trip to McDonald's Just What the Doctor Ordered?

By MELANIE WARNER

Published: May 2, 2005

For the last 28 years, Dr. Dean Ornish has been trying to persuade people to eat healthier. In his five books, he champions low-fat diets; he was one of the first researchers to show that stringent healthy eating can reverse chronic illness, particularly heart disease. Among his advice to patients is to eat a lot of vegetables and minimally processed foods, and avoid all things greasy.

Dr. Ornish also works for the McDonald's Corporation. As a paid consultant, he meets with top executives, gives talks to employees and recently wrote nutritional words of wisdom about diet and breast cancer for table displays to go into all McDonald's restaurants in the United States for Mother's Day.

He is not the only one straddling this line between science and commerce. In the last two years, at least two dozen leading nutrition scientists and experts have started working for large food companies, either as consultants or as members of health advisory boards. Most do not directly promote products, though Dr. Arthur Agatston, a practicing cardiologist and author of ''The South Beach Diet,'' has a licensing deal with Kraft Foods to sell a line of South Beach foods, which are appearing on supermarket shelves this month.

As concerns mount over the nation's elevated obesity rates and the surge in diet-related illnesses, food companies have received heightened scrutiny from Congress and face threats of litigation from trial lawyers. In response, companies have fashioned ''health and wellness'' initiatives. And companies like McDonald's, Kraft, PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company have created advisory boards, putting people who might otherwise be critics on the payroll.

Their dual roles have created a deep divide in the scientific community. Some critics say that working for a large food company compromises the credibility of scientists' research and makes them look like part-time company representatives. They say advisory boards and tacit endorsements from health gurus do more to make companies look good and help them sell products than inspire change.

''These companies can say we have all these really important people who care about health working with us, and that takes some of the heat off,'' said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University. ''But all they're doing is making junk food marginally healthier.''

But scientists working for the food companies say they hope to improve the American diet from within.

Dr. Ornish, who is president and director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, which is based in Sausalito, Calif., and studies the effects of diet and lifestyle choices on health and disease, says he wants to help McDonald's become a healthier company, a place that one day will sell a lot more of the kind of food he counsels people to eat. He won't say how much McDonald's pays him, but he says the money is not why he's doing it.

''A lot of colleagues were puzzled at first by my decision, but now they see it as a logical extension of what I've been doing my whole career,'' said Dr. Ornish, who also works for PepsiCo and ConAgra Foods. ''It's an amazing platform to make a difference.''

Sometimes a scientist's name appears on a food package. Health tips from the fitness expert Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper appear on packages of Frito-Lay's baked snack chips, for example, with his name attached. Other times a scientist appears in marketing material: a photo of Dr. John P. Foreyt, a researcher on heart disease at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, is in a Coca-Cola ad in magazines like Good Housekeeping this month.

Dr. Agatston, who is an associate professor at the University of Miami School of Medicine, says he decided against appearing in ads for Kraft. Instead, the South Beach logo appears in large type on two dozen products.

One medical specialist recruited to a food company advisory board has already decided that membership was not worth the cost. Dr. George L. Blackburn, director of the Center for the Study of Nutrition Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a prominent researcher on obesity issues, decided to step down from a McDonald's advisory council on balanced lifestyles two months ago.

In an interview, he said he left because he was disappointed that McDonald's had not incorporated his recommendations into its recent ''Balanced Lifestyles'' campaign. ''Our message here at the center is threefold: cut the calories, eat quality food and exercise,'' said Dr. Blackburn. ''The first two messages weren't making it through.''

McDonald's new worldwide health education campaign, introduced last month, focuses largely on exercise, with little discussion of diet. ''If I were on the exercise side, I'd be ecstatic,'' said Dr. Blackburn. ''But I'm focused on the role of food in a healthy lifestyle. Every scientist knows that increasing exercise is not going to replace cutting the calories.''

McDonald's executives said that they were surprised by Dr. Blackburn's resignation, and that they were committed to changing the company's menu and encouraging better nutrition habits among customers.